Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay

    In what has become an irritating and unending cycle of bimbo-starlet and pseudo-celebrity tabloid journalism, it is a timely reminder that there was once a film critic – who wrote like a poet – that admired a movie star – a clown who moved with a dancer’s grace – enough to write a screenplay for him.  That’s exactly what James Agee did for Charlie Chaplin.  Their film never got made, which is almost incidental because the story behind it reads like a movie plot in John Wranovics’s Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of The Tramp, The Writer, And The Lost Screenplay.  It is a true-life Chaplinesque plot of good and evil with nothing in between.
    The book is divided into two parts.  Wranovics does a terrific job in the first section summarizing how Agee and Chaplin almost collaborated.  The two first met in 1947 when Agee defended Chaplin at a raucous Manhattan press conference for the comedian-director’s Monsieur Verdoux.  Verdoux, a dark comedy based on the true story of a serial killer, was the first film where Chaplin did not portray his iconic cane-carrying Tramp (though if you study Verdoux’s closing moments...).  Right wing reporters led by Hedda Hopper (whose cameo appearance as herself comes off as a bitchy joke at her own expense in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard) in Hollywood and Ed Sullivan (who was a newspaper columnist before hosting his long-running CBS Sunday night variety show) in New York succeeded in destroying Verdoux’s box office intake, along with Chaplin’s reputation.
In post-World War II America, Chaplin’s public defense of friends and/or colleagues accused of being Communists outraged the well financed, and mobilized super-patriots scattered among the government, religious, and entertainment communities.  Detractors were unmoved by the director of The Great Dictator’s belief that “super-patriotism leads to Hitlerism and we have had our lesson from that.”  Compounding his problems, the British-born entertainer’s refusal to become an American citizen, reputation as a ladies’ man slapped with an ugly paternity suit (a blood test proved the child was not his), and marrying the 18-year old daughter of Eugene O’Neill, only helped make him the test case for the blacklistings that followed.  While promoting Limelight overseas in 1952, Chaplin was denied a re-entry visa back into the United States.  He lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life.
    Undaunted by public opinion and struggling with his own personal demons, Agee never stopped defending Chaplin.  His adoration went beyond essays and reviews, crystallizing into an untitled film treatment that Wranovics calls The Tramp’s New World.  The draft, which forms the second part of the book, was buried in The University of Texas archives.  The Tramp’s New World takes place after a nuclear war.  In his notes for the screenplay, Agee considered The Tramp “in many ways as suggestible and spontaneous as a child, fundamentally he is the strongest thing in human life.”  The apocalyptic fable also contains elements lovingly lifted from Chaplin’s The Kid, Modern Times, and The Circus – for in all those films and others, the Tramp symbolizes survival of the human spirit.
    Wranovics never condemns Agee for being in denial over the film not being made for the two undeniable reasons of Chaplin’s exile from America and retirement of the Tramp.  Instead, he concentrates on how The Tramp’s New World influenced both artists’ other work.  Before Agee’s death in 1955 at the age of 46, he wrote the screenplay for Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1954).  A remarkable Southern Gothic thriller (still not on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American films of all time), Night reflects Agee’s lifelong concern for children.  When not composing new music scores for his silent films, Chaplin directed two more films before his death in 1977.  One of them, A King in New York (1957), includes a subplot about atomic power.
    Other than publishing of the Agee draft, Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of The Tramp, The Writer, And The Lost Screenplay doesn’t offer any new information on either artist.  That can be found by revisiting both men’s respective works or possibly by two upcoming events: The University of Tennessee is publishing the complete set of James Agee’s papers and Kino International is about to release a new print of The Great Dictator.
Still, familiarity is never a bad thing when presented with enthusiasm and appreciation.  Wranovics reminds readers and cinema buffs of two key figures from both sides of the camera that found each other during a troubled time in their lives – and history’s.